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Plenary Session 2-6 May 2008 – In the social teaching of the Church, solidarity and subsidiarity... Read more

Until recently it was possible to circumvent exclusion, destitution and misery. Today that concealment is impossible, because instead of progress in overcoming poverty, threats emerge of an epidemic of hunger, on which the Brazilian Josué de Castro has written shocking pages. Those calamities have increased: in fact, according to the World Bank, the 83% rise in food prices over the past three years has pushed us back seven years: although we seem to move forward like the turtle in the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, we remain in the same place or regress.
In these sessions we will deal with of solidarity and subsidiarity, which are necessary in this turbulent period in which the reaction of the excluded becomes challenging. The resignation of old has been repealed by the new media. The aggressiveness of those who have nothing to lose is correlated with the aggressiveness of those who have little to share. This contrasts with the attitude of those who add to the futile accumulation of goods that are asleep in the soil, the awakening of violence in the wretched of the earth. The culture of affluence repeats the scene of parable of the rich man's table but the number of diners hasn't increased, and that which falls off the table is insufficient for those below, who await, starving.